Thursday 23 May
 
 

Dexter: The Seventh Season

There's no way to discuss the seventh and penultimate season of Showtime's hit Dexter without acknowledging how the previous year ended. Therefore, if you haven't finished the sixth season, stop reading now. You've got work to do.
05/21/2013 | Comments 0

Nightfall

As Simon Lam gets older, he gets better. The veteran actor has appeared in such in seminal HK action films of the 1990s as Once Upon a Time in China (opposite Jet Li) and Bullet in the Head (directed by John Woo); in the aughts, he graced audience and critical favorites Election and Ip Man.
05/20/2013 | Comments 0

Grand Duel

Lee Van Cleef enjoyed a secondary career in Italy cranking out spaghetti Westerns, with little regard to quality. However, 1972’s Grand Duel — aka The Big Showdown — is deserving of its Grand label. No wonder Quentin Tarantino borrowed its sweeping theme song by Luis Bacalov for Kill Bill; you'll recognize it in two notes.
05/20/2013 | Comments 0

The Last Stand

Early in The Last Stand, the small-town sheriff played by Arnold Schwarzenegger says, "It's my day off. Should be a quiet weekend." That's the new way of saying, "I've got one week to retirement," because it signals — with flashing neon and everything — that life is going to royally upend those plans.
05/17/2013 | Comments 0

Texas Chainsaw

One of the most inconsistent franchises in movie history is the one beget by Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. How does one follow all those less-than-beloved sequels? Lionsgate's latest in the series — the seventh — has a solution: Ignore 'em.
05/17/2013 | Comments 0
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Thriller
 

The Place Beyond the Pines

The route of ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’ is great to good.


Thriller

Phil Bacharach
The Place Beyond the Pines is two-thirds of a great movie. Director Derek Cianfrance’s follow-up to 2010’s Oscar-nominated Blue Valentine is a tense, powerful crime thriller with some weighty stuff on its mind. It speaks to the filmmaker’s know-how that not even a crazily contrived third act can damper its haunting power.
 
Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Birdemic 2: The Resurrection

What the flock?!?


Thriller

Rod Lott
For those worried that Birdemic 2: The Resurrection doesn’t match the awfulness of the 2010 original, know this: The first five minutes are of its ostensible leading man walking. The first exchange of dialogue: “Hi!” “Hi.”
 
Friday, April 26, 2013

Upstream Color

Viewers may not be able to decipher it, but its artful mysteries are compelling enough to try.


Thriller

Rod Lott
Upstream Color
7:30 p.m. Thursday, 5:30 and 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday
Oklahoma City Museum of Art
415 Couch
okcmoa.com
236-3100
$6-$8
 
Wednesday, April 24, 2013

The Company You Keep

Old radicals don't learn new tricks.


Thriller

Phil Bacharach
Baby boomers can be their own worst enemy. The generation that was going to change the world instead settled on thinking the world of themselves. Youthful idealism, aging and compromised idealism, pining for that youthful idealism — nothing fuels anti-boomer sentiment like boomer sentimentality.
 
Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Trance

‘Trainspotting’ engineer Danny Boyle delves back into the world of crime with ‘Trance,’ with less-than-hypnotic results.


Thriller

Rod Lott
After fiddling around with Oscar a couple of times with Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours, director Danny Boyle gets back to doing what he does best: the thriller. However, in Trance, opening today in Oklahoma City, the flashy filmmaker bears a light coat of rust.
 
Friday, April 12, 2013

The Loneliest Planet

Take a hike, movie.


Thriller

Rod Lott
The Loneliest Planet
5:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday
Oklahoma City Museum of Art
415 Couch
okcmoa.com
236-3100
$5-$8
 
Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Zero Dark Thirty

Controversy doesn’t lessen the impact of one of 2012’s best films.


Thriller

Phil Bacharach
Don’t trust the audience members.

Trusting them appears to be the cardinal sin of Zero Dark Thirty, a masterful, absorbing film dramatizing the CIA's 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden. It has been at the center of controversy for its depiction of U.S. intelligence agents using “enhanced interrogation techniques,” otherwise known as torture.
 
Wednesday, January 9, 2013

A Destructive Manner

Your average office worker can be pushed only so far, as this locally shot thriller dramatically demonstrates.


Thriller

Rod Lott
A Destructive Manner
8 p.m. Saturday
The Paramount OKC
701 W. Sheridan
theparamountokc.com
517-0787
$3
 
Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Argo

As a director, Ben Affleck ratchets up the tension in this fact-based thriller.


Thriller

Phil Bacharach
Generating suspense from a story that is a matter of historical record is no easy thing. That was the primary challenge facing Ben Affleck and Chris Terrio, the director-star and writer, respectively, of Argo, a thriller inspired by a real-life covert operation that helped rescue six U.S. embassy workers out of Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis. It's a testament to the skills of the filmmakers that Argo delivers a deluge of suspense even when its ending is never in doubt.
 
Monday, October 15, 2012

Killer Joe

The trailer-trash noir dares you not to look.


Thriller

Phil Bacharach
Killer Joe is brutal, pulpy and utterly, irresistibly lurid — provided, that is, you like your perversity when it’s deep-fried and extra crispy.
 
Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Headhunters

Oslo can you go? To the depths of man’s darkest and deadliest desires, according to a fun foreign crime thriller.


Thriller

Rod Lott
Headhunters
8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday
Oklahoma City Museum of Art
415 Couch
okcmoa.com
236-3100
$5-$8
 
Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Nobody Else but You

An ill-fated actress serves as the heart of a strange French thriller.


Thriller

Rod Lott
Nobody Else but You
8 p.m. Saturday
Oklahoma City Museum of Art
415 Couch
okcmoa.com
236-3100
$5-$8
 
Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Savages


Thriller

Phil Bacharach
Oliver Stone might be best-known for making movies filled with political and cultural bomb-throwing (JFK, Natural Born Killers), but what makes his best works so eminently watchable is their visceral punch. He might claim he’s out to edify, but the guy can exploit with the best of ’em.
 
Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Thrills are muted but chilling in the espionage tale of ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.’


Thriller

Phil Bacharach
For a guy named Smiley, the central character of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” doesn’t do a lot of smiling.
 
Wednesday, January 4, 2012

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo


Thriller

Rod Lott
As not-so-boldly predicted, director David Fincher (“The Social Network”) delivers a superior remake of Sweden’s global hit “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” an adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s phenomenon of a novel.
 
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
 
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